Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
The second remarkable case is the burial of Meryra, First Prophet of the Aten in
Akhetaten and, with the same office, but name changed in Meryneith, at Saqqara.
Comparisons between the two tombs can be made with a certain degree of precision,
nevertheless the memphite tomb is much smaller and less beautiful, sign of the
inevitable decline of the Aten cult, to which Meryneith was associated. The change of
the name is typical of a change in the regime and involves another well discussed
character: a certain Paatenemheb (Royal Scribe and Troops Overseer), owner of a
small tomb at Amarna; a second Paatenemheb (Overseer of all the king’s workers,
Royal Butler) buried at Saqqara, but whose tomb is now completely disappeared apart
from the chapel that was dismantled and reassembled at Leiden, and the more famous
Horemheb, later the last Eighteenth Dynasty king. No comparison is possible between
the first two officers, whose titles let us know that they are two different people, while
is open between the Amarna Paatenemheb and Horemheb, also if we need to suppose
a name change, nowhere else documented.A similar case is the one of a certain
Hatiay, buried at Thebes with a beautiful equipment and the titles of Scribe and
Overseer of the Granary of the Temple of Aten and a homonymous owner of a tomb
(empty) at Saqqara, where he shows off similar title of Scribe of the Treasury in the
Temple of the Aten.
Another uncertain case is the one of May, maybe buried at Amarna with the title
of Overseer of all the King’s works, and Maya, which in his memphite tomb declares
to be an Overseer of the Treasure; this man is well documented under the reign of
Tutankhamun and Horemheb (until year VIII).Finally, is with absolute certaincy the
we can deny the identity between the famous Vizier Ramose of TT 55 and a
homonymous Ramose owner of a modest tomb at Amarna. It should be also ridiscussed
the attribution of TT 136 proposed by H. Schlogl and A. Grimm to a certain
Ipy, known for his Amarna tomb and maybe related to the same Vizier Ramose.
The fate of the voiced plosives of Proto-Egyptian.
Helmut Satzinger
In the traditional view of historical Egyptian phonology, the language has four voiced
stops, namely b, d, D, and g. According to the sensational discoveries of O. RÖSSLER
(1971), only two of them have remained, namely b and g. It was shown that the
phoneme that is transcribed as d since one hundred years is in reality an emphatic
dental or alvolar stop, whereas D is an emphatic palatal, result, inter alia, of the
palatalization of q. Of course, the language also had a voiced dental/alveolar stop, at
least in its proto-historical phase. Yet this phoneme has mutated into a sound that
resembled the Semitic ayin. This appears to be a very drastic sound-change. In this
paper, however, it shall be shown that (the original) d was not the only voiced plosive
that underwent substantial change. The arguments will be based, in the main, on Afro-
Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) etymologies, but also, for corroboration, on pairs of
Egyptian root doublets. Exx.: DnH vs. gnH, “wing”, Arabic ganâH, id.; gAf “to bake”
vs. DAf “to burn”. The results of the investigation seem to point to a remarkable
(probably dialectal) variation. Virtually every voiced stop may have yielded two
different phonemes. E.g., old *d may become either new Ayin, or new “d” (=
emphatic t). Historical Egyptian, in particular Classical Egyptian, turns out to be quite
heterogenous, though only on the level of closely related idioms, and not necessarily
of a character of a “Mischsprache”.
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